November 25, 2006

More from the Steve Chen Supercomputer Interview

The Chinese government supports university research and gives them money to pay for the use of the service [supercomputer grid]. That is better than to spend money on buying thousands of separate smaller systems and none of them can do significant work. China only has two supercomputer centers now. Steve Chen is recommending and apparently China is funding the provision of 10-100 Tflop/s system per node, about 100 nodes, each node supported by hundreds or thousands of 1 Tflop/s group level or smaller personal supercomputers, and link all these together as an Integral Grid with shared capability and capacity up to 1-10 Petaflop/s. The grid would be shared by the thousands of universities across China.

The Third brain project the closest thing that I have seen to a state sponsored project with strong transhumanist and artificial intelligence goals. The goals being to create new artificial higher brain functions. (Steve Chen defines the First brain as the Cerebrum and the Second Brain as the Cerebellum)